‘It shouldn’t take too long. They shift people through pretty quickly.’ The man in front of her turns and nods towards the front of the queue. ‘They do free entry sometimes. Now that’s a queue.’ He wears a crisp linen jacket and the air of the independently wealthy.
When he smiles at her, she wonders if the fact that she’s English is actually writ large all over her. ‘I’m not sure all these people will even fit inside.’
‘Oh, they will. It’s like the Tardis in there.’ When she smiles, he holds out a hand. ‘Tim Freeland.’
‘Liv Worth – Halston. Liv Halston.’ The change of name still wrongfoots her.
‘Ah. That poster says there’s a big Matisse exhibition on. I suspect that’s the reason for our queue. Here. Let me put up my umbrella. That will protect you from the worst of the sun.’
He comes over for the tennis every year, he tells her, as they shuffle forwards a few paces at a time, zigzagging their way towards the front of the queue. And then fills his non-tennis time with a few of his favourite places. He much prefers this gallery to the Louvre, which is too full of tourists to see the paintings. He half smiles as he says this, apparently aware of the irony.
He is tall and tanned with dark blond hair, which is swept back in a way she imagines it has been since his teens. The way he talks about his life suggests freedom from financial concerns. His reference to children and the lack of a wedding ring suggest some distant divorce.
He is attentive and charming. They discuss restaurants in Paris, tennis, the unpredictability of Parisian taxi drivers. It is a relief to have a conversation that is not loaded with unspoken resentment or littered with traps. By the time they reach the front of the queue she is oddly cheerful.
‘Well, you made the time pass wonderfully quickly.’ Tim Freeland folds up his umbrella and holds out his hand. ‘It was lovely to meet you, Olivia Halston. And I’d recommend the Impressionists on the top floor. You should get the best views now, before the crowds get too unbearable.’
He smiles at her, his eyes crinkling, and then he is gone, striding off into the cavernous interior of the museum as if he is already sure where he is headed. And Liv, who knows that even if you are on your honeymoon you’re allowed to feel cheered by twenty minutes’ conversation with an attentive, handsome man, who may or may not have been flirting with you, walks with a slightly perkier stride towards the lifts.
She takes her time, walks slowly along the Impressionists, studying each painting carefully. She has time to kill, after all. She is slightly ashamed to calculate she has not set foot in a gallery since finishing her degree two years previously. She decides, on reflection, that she loves the Monets and the Morisots, and dislikes the Renoirs. Or perhaps they have just been overused on chocolate boxes and it’s hard to disassociate the two things.
She sits down, and then she stands up again. She wishes David was here. It’s odd to stand in front of the paintings and have nobody to discuss them with. She finds herself looking surreptitiously at other people who might be alone, checking them for signs of freakishness. She wonders whether to call Jasmine, just to talk to someone, but realizes this will signal publicly the failure of her honeymoon. Who calls anyone from their honeymoon, after all? She feels briefly cross with David again and has silently to argue herself out of it.
The gallery fills steadily around her; a group of schoolchildren is led past by a theatrically engaged museum attendant. They stop in front of Déjeuner sur l’herbe, and he motions to them to sit down as he speaks. ‘Look!’ he exclaims in French. ‘They placed wet paint on wet paint – the first artists to do so! – so that they could move the colours like this …’ He gesticulates wildly. The children are rapt. A cluster of adults stops to listen too.
‘And this painting caused a huge scandal when it was shown! Enormous! Why was the lady wearing no clothes, and the gentlemen were dressed? Why do you think, young sir?’
She loves the fact that eight-year-old French children are expected to debate public nudity. She loves the respect with which the attendant addresses them. Again, she wishes David were here because she knows he would have felt like this too.
It is several minutes before she realizes how many people have poured into the series of rooms and that it has now become stiflingly crowded. She keeps hearing English and American accents. For some reason they annoy her. She finds herself irritated suddenly by small things.
Keen to escape, Liv ducks away, through one, two rooms, past a series of landscapes, until she reaches the less popular artists, where the visitors are sparse. She slows now, trying to give these lesser artists the same attention she gave the big names, although there is not much that draws the eye. She is about to look for the way out when she finds herself in front of a small oil painting, and there, almost despite herself, she stops. A red-haired woman stands beside a table, laden with the remains of a meal, wearing a white dress that may be some kind of undergarment; Liv can’t tell. Her body is half turned away from view, but the side of her face is unobscured. Her gaze slides towards the artist but will not meet it. Her shoulders are hunched forward with displeasure, or tension.
The title of the painting reads: ‘Wife, out of sorts’.
She gazes at it, taking in the exquisite limpid quality of the woman’s eye, the points of colour on her cheeks, the way her body seems to suggest barely suppressed rage, and yet a kind of defeat too. And Liv thinks suddenly: Oh, God. That’s me.
Once this thought has popped into her head it will not be dislodged. She wants to look away but she cannot. She feels almost winded, as if she has been punched. The painting is so strangely intimate, so unsettling. I’m twenty-three years old, she thinks. And I have married a man who has already put me firmly in the background of his life. I’m going to be that sad, quietly furious woman in the kitchen whom nobody notices, desperate for his attention, sulking when she doesn’t get it. Doing things alone and ‘making the best of it’.
She sees future trips with David: herself, flicking through guidebooks of local attractions, trying not to show her disappointment when, yet again, there is some important work thing he cannot miss. I’m going to end up like my mother. She left it too late to remember who she actually was before she became a wife.
Wifey.
The Musée d’Orsay is suddenly too crowded, too noisy. She finds herself pushing her way downstairs, going the wrong way through the advancing crowds, muttering apologies as she meets the resistance of shoulders, elbows, bags. She slips sideways down a flight of stairs, and weaves her way along a corridor, but instead of heading towards the exit, she finds herself beside a grand dining room, where a queue has started to build for tables. Where are the bloody exits? The place is suddenly ridiculously full of people. Liv fights her way through the art-deco section – the huge pieces of organic furniture grotesque, overly flamboyant, and realizes she is at the wrong end. She lets out a great sob of something she can’t quite articulate.